God seldom chooses the people that we expect. God seems to prefer the younger and inexperienced to the elder and accomplished, the unlikely to the logical. God chooses Jacob over his elder brother Esau. God chooses Joseph and David over their elder brothers. When God needs a prophet, he chooses Amos who is a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees or Jeremiah who is a boy. God chooses Mary though she is a lowly handmaiden and Paul though he is a persecutor of the Church. It is difficult to predict who God is going to call. It is not we who choose God, but God who chooses us and God will choose who God will choose.
This call comes anew again and again. To answer it means a newness of life, as it did for those first disciples. It requires severing old ways of thinking and acting. It means putting aside our self-focused values and taking on a new way of seeing ourselves and our world.
And it requires a choice. It requires putting faith into practice. Like Peter and Andrew, and James and John, we are called to cast our nets and be fishers of people. We are all called to minister and proclaim, as did Isaiah, "Anguish has taken wing, darkness is dispelled." How we respond to His call is the measure by which the Good News of Salvation is spread throughout our world.
Throughout most of our lives, we are surrounded by the darkness of "bad news:" the futility and slaughter of war, the miseries of poverty, the stressed environment, the divide between races and religions, the conflicts across national borders, the sick left untended, the aged neglected and the killing of the unborn. In many ways we are "overshadowed by" and quite aware of death on a large, communal scale as we watch the devastation of natural forces, but also in our individual lives, insignificant from a world perspective, but so very important to us.
But the "good news" is that God is with us in the darkness.
The first disciples dropped everything and left everything safe and comfortable to follow Jesus immediately. For most of us, the call to follow Jesus has not nearly been as dramatic. But we too need to recognize the immediacy of His call, the importance of His message for today's world.
God is always preparing us for the next call. That is why conversion of heart is an essential virtue of discipleship. We must be people who honestly claim what is in our hearts, what we seek, what we need, what we yearn for. These feelings are not random movements. They are the work of the Spirit prompting us and preparing us. And when we are willing to be attentive to the Spirit’s action, we will be ready, so that when Jesus walks by and says, “Come!” we will immediately leave what we have, cast out our nets and follow him.
The Lord sends us an urgent invitation to participate in important work to bring the Light into the Darkness. The Kingdom is at hand. The Kingdom is now!
